This May (14-15), the Chinese city of Chongqing will host the first of the Alliance’s two annual Low-Carbon Development forums, providing the Alliance and its members an opportunity to explore a new area in the expanding frontiers of China’s burgeoning wave of low-carbon cities.

The forum will see the Alliance bring its high-level collection of industry experts, researchers, and public officials from among its global network to Chongqing, lending their insights on a variety of issues and themes central to sustainable and low-carbon development. The themes addressed at the forum will include:

Health and Retirement Services Innovation: Exploring innovations and developments in the health and wellbeing services provided for the expanding senior citizen population. Bringing a wealth of insights and examples from across the Alliance’s international network on innovation models and cooperation, health care services, big data applications and promotion, and the pension services industry.

Urban Innovation: Studying urban development innovations in various European cities to offer experiences gathered in pushing today’s aging cities towards a sustainable model of the future and utilizing green and low-carbon technologies in urban transformations.

Smart and green manufacturing: Offering insights on the future of Chinese manufacturing, with an eye on domestic production in 2025 and exploring examples from leading European regions such as Germany’s innovative industry model, and addressing the impact and benefit of such evolving trends: cloud computing, big data, and technologies enabling modern manufacturing processes. This theme will also touch on the groundbreaking work done in the Nordic region to develop a circular economy model.

Networks and new logistics services: Studying the development prospects of intelligent logistics, logistics and finance to lead the new concept of new business models, networking and intelligence, logistics, and drawing insights from the European logistics market and future trends.

Programs

A research project conducted by the Universities of Turku and Tampere which aims to form a new conceptual framework which will help shape the collective identity and common vision necessary to realize the future low-carbon and sustainability targets.

An action learning and research project conducted by Aalto University and the University of Tampere which aimed to form a better understanding of the architectural requirements for successful innovation projects.